Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of scenarios to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve storage of vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended storing and processing the information. Maintaining accurate replicated backup storage of the information is often very important for a variety or reasons (e.g., disaster recovery, corruption correction, system maintenance, etc.). Various resources organized in a variety of architectures or hierarchies (e.g., virtual resources, global zones, exclusive IP zones, resource clusters, network interfaces, etc.) are often relied upon to support and manage storage of data.
Some virtualization approaches utilize a concept of zones associated with virtual machines running on a system. In some conventional approaches, each virtual machine is in a different local zone and at least one or more local zones can not access data in the other local zones. There can be a shared IP local zone in which a network interface assigned to the local zone can be shared with a global zone and possibly with one or more other shared IP zones. However, there can also be one or more zones which restrict network interface sharing with other zones. For example, an exclusive IP zone is a virtualization technique provided in some operating systems in which a network device or interface is typically exclusively accessible only in the particular local zone designated as an exclusive IP zone. However, traditionally there is usually no support of high availability (HA) cluster server environments for network interfaces associated with exclusive IP zones monitored from global zones.
Normal network resource monitoring methods valid within global/shared-IP zones often fail in the case of a network resource associated with an exclusive IP zone. Some traditional operating systems have some support for exclusive IP zones in which the exclusive-IP zone can have its own IP-related state and tuning variables, but monitoring of network resources associated with the exclusive IP zone is limited or not possible. An exclusive IP zone is usually assigned its own set of data-links when the zone is configured. Usually an interface configured in an exclusive IP zone can not be shared with any other local or global zone and conventional attempts at monitoring from a global zone do not typically work in this scenario. For example, a process running in the global zone usually cannot access required information about the network interface or data link (e.g., real time number of packets received/sent, flags/options configured for data-link, IP address assigned to an interface, etc.) in order to monitor health of the link and perform failover in case of failure. This limitation often limits or prevents high availability (HA) for such exclusive IP zone network interfaces.